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Kontron

About Kontron

Kontron is a global leader in embedded computing technology (ECT). As a part of technology group S&T, Kontron offers a combined portfolio of secure hardware, middleware and services for Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 applications. With its standard products and tailor-made solutions based on highly reliable state-of-the-art embedded technologies, Kontron provides secure and innovative applications for a variety of industries. As a result, customers benefit from accelerated time-to-market, reduced total cost of ownership, product longevity and the best fully integrated applications overall. Kontron is a listed company. Its shares are traded in the Prime Standard segment of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and on other exchanges under the symbol “KBC”.

Kontron designs hardware for the software defined world. Service providers and enterprise clients around the globe collaborate with Kontron and its ISV and channel partners to deploy new services with greater speed, confidence and operational efficiency. Our portfolio is a best-of-breed of OEM hardware and SYMKLOUD Open Infrastructure Platforms dedicated to the deployment of virtual services using software defined networks (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV).

Kontron has more than 16 years of experience delivering reliable solutions based computer-on-module technology. Coupled with the company’s extensive experience and expertise, Kontron’s support of the three COM Express® form factors lends additional weight to why it is the “choice” solution for application developers. Through the use of consistent COM Express® connectors and feature implementation, Kontron’s modules are easily exchangeable and offer the most flexibility for customers designing them into different size embedded devices. As a true partner, Kontron delivers all of the needed support to help customers reduce time-to-market and gain a competitive advantage. Kontron has been a driving influencer of the COM Express® standard and Kontron engineers continue to be deeply involved in new developments for the standard and is a member of PICMG®, the consortium governing the COM Express® specification.

Single turnkey high availability platform to deploy Kubernetes

What is Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source software for orchestrating the deployment, scaling and management of containers. It was originally designed and developed by Google but is now an open-source software maintained by the Linux Foundation under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) umbrella.

Containers enable multiple programs to run in packaged virtualised environment; aka containers, where they can only see and use the contents and resources assigned to that container.

This is significantly different from the traditional approach, where programs ran in an operating system (OS) environment and could see all the resources in the system running through that OS – with some filter from user profiling.

So multiple programs (can) run inside one container and multiple containers can run in the same orchestration environment. You can just run one program in a container as well if you want to.

This enables more efficient use of resources by the programs and also helps avoid access and, potentially, security issues, associated with the more traditional approach; where the whole system was exposed by the OS – depending on user profiling.

Containerised workflows are controlled by Kubernetes as the orchestration software (for example) and can be load-balanced across a large resource pool of workers (compute resources).

In other words, you can take a lot of server computers, make them into a resource pool and fill those resources very efficiently with Kubernetes & Docker. Kubernetes ensures the workloads are scaled for optimal performances across your server pool running the programs your users need. A lot of that efficiency comes from not having resources ‘ring fenced’ for programs which ‘might need them’, which is a key issue with the traditional approach or a static configuration with other cloud technologies. When you don’t need the resources they can be powered down or allocated to run other processes or containers and Kubernetes can manage that for you when given the right configuration.

This is one big advantage of running Kubernetes on the Kontron Symkloud architecture, it enables all those compute resources to be fielded in a very dense, power efficient way while also integrating the L2/L3 ‘leaf’ switch into the same architecture. This means less rack space and power consumption for more output, as well as a far greater level of control over the resources and environment from fewer touch points than would be possible with elements – while still retaining the benefits of separate data-plane and control-plane traffic and traffic-management through the switches. Lastly, because our switches can be managed by SDN controllers like top of rack switches, the network itself, between the resource elements, can be automated and ‘self-learning’ with a high level of redundancy.

As Kubernetes is open-source, there is no software lock-in by Kontron. You can equally run Docker on Symkloud over CentOS or Ubuntu operating systems or leverage Kubernetes alongside Docker to orchestrate multiple units. What we have done is build value by testing and determining the optimal power and compute package to both run the Kubernetes orchestration and control environment and still provide plenty of worker resources to be used by the containers. This can save hours, days or even weeks, depending on how much experience and resources an operator or service provider has to throw at the issue.

Once it’s up and running, there is a secondary benefit that the Kontron Symkloud can be added to or upgraded. It’s not a single-use vehicle or dedicated appliance. Kontron have been shipping the same MS29xx frame and backplane since 2012-2013 when we introduced it, so customers since then have been able to progress through GbE to 10GbE to 40GbE and now 1, 10, 25, 40, 50 or 100Gbps interconnects and through three generations of Intel® processor sleds.

Just start with one SYMKLOUD Kubernetes Platform to run microservices at the edge or central office. Then add more compute as needed.

With the SYMKLOUD Kubernetes Platform, Kontron has eliminated the integration headaches of Kubernetes and Docker engines to ensure a faster set up of any cloud environment. Moreover, Kontron ensures that its SYMKLOUD Kubernetes Platform replicates the work done by Canonical to make Kubernetes as secure as it is easy to deploy, operate and upgrade.

Kontron also choose to integrate the Canonical Distribution of Kubernetes because it is GPU and Nvidia CUDA ready. This means any GPU components can be detected, configured and made easily composable in SYMKLOUD hardware. This opens up numerous opportunities for service providers to generate new revenues from intelligent services derived from edge-related GPU machine learning, AI and transcoding services.

Leading Light Technologies Ltd, trading as L2Tek, is a manufacturers’ representative and distributor specialising in electronics hardware, software and semiconductor IP for the broadcast, professional video, IPTV, surveillance and industrial imaging markets.

In addition, the company offers design services based on extensive experience in these sectors.